A group of evolutionary biologists sees evidence for a hologenome. Others dismiss it
entirely. One thing’s certain: The debate remains heated.
Image credit: Shutterstock/Piriya Gutsch.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Edited by Kenneth W. Wachter, University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved November 20, 2015 (received for review July 22, 2015)
Significance
Despite a surge in policy and research attention to conflict and bullying among adolescents, there is little evidence to suggest that current interventions reduce school conflict. Using a large-scale field experiment, we show that it is possible to reduce conflict with a student-driven intervention. By encouraging a small set of students to take a public stance against typical forms of conflict at their school, our intervention reduced overall levels of conflict by an estimated 30%. Network analyses reveal that certain kinds of students (called “social referents”) have an outsized influence over social norms and behavior at the school. The study demonstrates the power of peer influence for changing climates of conflict, and suggests which students to involve in those efforts.
Abstract
Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anticonflict intervention across 56 schools with 24,191 students. After comprehensively measuring every school’s social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20–32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged their public stance against conflict at school. Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 30% over 1 year. The effect was stronger when the seed group contained more “social referent” students who, as network measures reveal, attract more student attention. Network analyses of peer-to-peer influence show that social referents spread perceptions of conflict as less socially normative.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: epaluck{at}princeton.edu.
Author contributions: E.L.P., H.S., and P.M.A. designed research; E.L.P. and H.S. performed research; P.M.A. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; E.L.P., H.S., and P.M.A. analyzed data; and E.L.P., H.S., and P.M.A. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: Replication codes are available at Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/29199), and replication data are archived at Princeton University, with data available on request (subject to relevant Institutional Review Board consent).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1514483113/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
- aDepartment of Psychology and Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540;
- bDepartment of Sociology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901;
- cDepartment of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520;
- dDepartment of Biostatistics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520
Edited by Kenneth W. Wachter, University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved November 20, 2015 (received for review July 22, 2015)
Significance
Despite a surge in policy and research attention to conflict and bullying among adolescents, there is little evidence to suggest that current interventions reduce school conflict. Using a large-scale field experiment, we show that it is possible to reduce conflict with a student-driven intervention. By encouraging a small set of students to take a public stance against typical forms of conflict at their school, our intervention reduced overall levels of conflict by an estimated 30%. Network analyses reveal that certain kinds of students (called “social referents”) have an outsized influence over social norms and behavior at the school. The study demonstrates the power of peer influence for changing climates of conflict, and suggests which students to involve in those efforts.
Abstract
Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anticonflict intervention across 56 schools with 24,191 students. After comprehensively measuring every school’s social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20–32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged their public stance against conflict at school. Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 30% over 1 year. The effect was stronger when the seed group contained more “social referent” students who, as network measures reveal, attract more student attention. Network analyses of peer-to-peer influence show that social referents spread perceptions of conflict as less socially normative.
- social influence
- social norms
- bullying
- adolescents
- social psychology
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: epaluck{at}princeton.edu.
Author contributions: E.L.P., H.S., and P.M.A. designed research; E.L.P. and H.S. performed research; P.M.A. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; E.L.P., H.S., and P.M.A. analyzed data; and E.L.P., H.S., and P.M.A. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: Replication codes are available at Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/29199), and replication data are archived at Princeton University, with data available on request (subject to relevant Institutional Review Board consent).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1514483113/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Changing climates of conflict
Sign up for Article Alerts
Article Classifications
- Social Sciences
- Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Jump to section
You May Also be Interested in
Chemical evidence suggests ritual use of psychoactive plants used to brew ayahuasca in pre-Columbian Bolivia.
Image courtesy of Juan Albarracin-Jordan and José M. Capriles.
Researchers present evidence of Neolithic kinship and violence based on remains from a mass grave in Poland.
Image courtesy of Piotr Włodarczak.
Volume of cosmonauts’ brain ventricles increased by an average of 12% after spaceflight—a potential mechanism to cope with increased brain fluid volume, a study suggests.
Image courtesy of R. Maxine Rühl.
PNAS Profile of NAS member and cell biologist Junying Yuan
Image courtesy of Aaron Washington for Harvard Medical School.